Hitchhiker InnerTube Frontend

A frontend for the InnerTube/YouTubeI API, designed after YouTube's 2013 Hitchhiker. Written in PHP 7. Heavily work in progress, I do not recommend use at the moment.

A disclaimer

I am a person with my own personal life. As such, updates may be rare. This is just a passion project, and I suggest you follow the development of Nightlinbit and aubymori's similar project on /r/OldYouTubeLayout.

If you want to make pull requests of your own, please go ahead. I am not the best at PHP and that will show in the quality of my code.

Current bugs I'm aware of

The following issues are already acknowledged, and probably will be patched in a later release.

• No player (I need to research player init, if you can contact Reprety/V3 Developer, please send him /u/YukisCoffee. Thank you <3)
• Video and subscription counts display as 0 on watch. These simply are hardcoded placeholder values until the proper code is written.
• Missing category in video descriptions (needs player API, which currently isn't requested).
• Watch doesn't acknowledge being signed in.
• Logged out guide may sometimes display a duplicate channel.
• Expanded masthead playlists bar doesn't work (I got sent the resources necessary, so implementation should come eventually).
• Subscriptions cannot be sorted (new API issue, will look into workarounds).
• Home may occasionally display a null video. Seems like stricter checks need to be implemented.
• All the missing pages (oops lol)
• Just about everything else.

Installation

Currently, this has only been tested on my personal Windows 10 PC running PHP 7.4. You may encounter issues if you're using a different OS or are just not me. Please report these to me using the issues tab so that I may fix them (please specify OS/version, PHP version/configuration, and software used).

You need PHP 7+ and a webserver. I recommend XAMPP. Composer packages are currently bundled with the project, however I suggest you install that as well.

Finally, getting it onto www.youtube.com: it may be possible to get it working with OS-native hosts file, however at the moment, you need external software that proxies it back to the domain:

• Fiddler Classic (recommended)
• Charles (download trial)
• mitmproxy

Fiddler Classic Configuration

_{Don't use Fiddler Everywhere. It sucks.}

Enable decryption of HTTPS traffic (from browsers only), then set up an AutoResponder rule that redirects REGEX:https://www.youtube.com/(.*) to http://127.0.0.1/$1 and tick the box that allows unmatched request passthrough. If you then want to hide Fiddler from view, then press CTRL+M. Fiddler will be accessible in the system tray.

I recommend using Fiddler Classic if you're on Windows, because it uses less RAM than Charles and it's more user-friendly than mitmproxy.

Charles Configuration

Enable SSL proxying and install the root certificate in your browser, then go to "Map Remote" and add a rule to redirect host www.youtube.com to http://127.0.0.1. If you then want to hide Charles from view, press CTRL+, to open "Preferences", then click "Minimise to system tray".

mitmproxy Configuration

You really got yourself into a mess, huh?

import mitmproxy.http
        
class HitchhikerFrontendRedirect:
    def __init__(self):
        print("Hitchhiker Frontend Redirect active")
    
    def request(self, flow: mitmproxy.http.HTTPFlow):
        if "www.youtube.com" in flow.request.pretty_host:
            flow.request.host = "127.0.0.1"
            flow.request.port = 80
            flow.request.scheme = "http"
    
addons = [ HitchhikerFrontendRedirect() ]

But wait! There's more. mitmproxy doesn't allow this on HTTP 2 hosts, meaning you need to pass the --no-http2 argument. Additionally, it likes to break WebSocket traffic, which was a common complaint levied against it in the GoodTube Discord server when that was around (it broke Discord image uploads), so you need to pass a TCP passthrough regex that ignores WS traffic. As such, I concocted this launch command just for you mitmproxy users:

mitmdump -s YOUR_PYTHON_FILE.py --no-http2 --tcp !(www.youtube.com)

Note that on Windows, the command is mitmdump. On Unix systems, this will be mitmproxy instead. Otherwise, the launch command should be the same.

I tested this with Discord image uploading, and it seems to work as it should. Please make an issue if problems arise.

Hostsfile Configuration

Too badass for mitmproxy? Give hostsfile a try!

I did all the work for you, actually. The requests library overcomes the need for a proxy at all by using manual nameserver lookups that bypass your system's hostsfile for requests. This may also be useful for you if you are having trouble with any proxy.

All you need to do is host this on localhost, add the rule to your hostsfile, enable it in the frontend config.json file, and then... set up SSL for it to work at all. As it turns out, YouTube uses HSTS, so you will probably get an SSL error that your browser doesn't let you bypass instead of the YouTube website.

_{I still recommend using a proxy, just because it's more user friendly 🥰}

Roadmap

At this point in development, most things are unfinished or only partially finished.

• Homepage (placeholder)
• Guide menu
• Signed in support
• Watch page (partial)
• Search page
• Channel page
• Playlist page
• Other feed pages
• Translations
• Clean-up

Love you! ❤ A nice shoutout to the GoodTube community on Discord for getting this party started! Thank you all 🥰